YouTube Gold: A Great Shaq Commercial

As we prowl the aisles and storage rooms of YouTube looking for good Gold candidates, sometimes we see stuff that is new but only because we’ve never seen it before.

Take this early Shaquille O’Neal commercial for Reebok.

What a great spot this was!

Shaq comes down the hall after a big game and runs into something invisible. Turns out it’s Wilt Chamberlain in a portal.

“You see that?” says Shaq.

“We see everything,” says Wilt, who tells him to “get in here.”

When Shaq gets in the portal, he finds not just Wilt, but also Bill Russell, John Wooden and a guy we still don’t recognize, which is unusual and frustrating. We can usually spot all the old-timers.

It’s all old-school stuff as the greats advise young Shaquille. It was pretty clear even at a very young age that he had the potential to be one of the great big men.

And he was.

But he never got to where he should have. He had no business playing at 325. Young Shaquille could run the court. At 325 he could dominate inside, but he sacrificed his agility. He could easily have lost 40-50 lbs and avoided the injuries that plagued him in the later years of his career.